I’ve gone on to exposing quite a few of these companies and their fraud. A few years ago, I covered one called ViSalus that was getting press in that community for growing quickly (today the pyramid has imploded and they are a quarter of what they were). ViSalus was a little different than other MLMs I had written about. They got a lot of young people, around ages 23-27 and they seemed to be the top marketers. ViSalus put out a a bunch of misleading information about their pyramid aimed at that young market.

With ViSalus’ implosion, it seemed like many of the brainwashed young distributors didn’t learn and jumped to Vemma’s Young People Revolution. Vemma had taken the attack to get your kids to another level in trying to brainwash them into believe they were part of some kind of “revolution.” In fact, it looks a lot more like the Young People Revolution is conning them into a pyramid scheme. I don’t see how it is any different than the FTC and even the FBI and Department of Justice investigating a similar MLM, HerbaLife, for recruiting people into a pyramid scheme.

I’ve noticed that Vemma seems to have taken things a step further and going to the college campuses. Maybe ViSalus did the same, but it didn’t seem as obvious to me. Nothing like convincing college kids with no income that they should be spending it on a $40 bottle of juice and/or a $75 case of 24 energy drinks.

However, this article isn’t about this ViSalus or Vemma. It’s about how MonaVie has decided to copy them to create their MonaVie Mynt program as a way to market to these young adults.

What is MonaVie Mynt

For a couple of weeks, MonaVie had a great page explaining MonaVie Mynt. They’ve since taken it down, but others on the internet have captured most of the important information. A simple Google search of this phrase shows:

“mynt™ is completely backed by MonaVie. It’s not a new company or a separate entity of MonaVie. It’s simply the brand name of MonaVie’s movement to attract those in the Gen C crowd and to create the next chapter in direct selling. mynt is a community of like-minded individuals who want to have fun!”

So as you can see there’s really nothing of substance to mynt, it is just a bunch of marketing hype to group some people (Gen C) and segregate others (older generations). Here’s some of MonaVie’s brain-dead marketing from their blog:

“mynt is kind of like a Harley Davidson gang… but without bikes… and on Facebook.” — Stephen Jones, MonaVie senior director of marketing, North America

“mynt is like throwing a pebble in the water; one simple act can create a #movemynt.” — Calli Mott, MonaVie director of North America

“mynt is completely innovative. It will change everything. Again.” — Katy Holt-Larsen, VP of North America

“mynt is not ‘the next big wave.’ Waves crash. We’ve created a movemynt!” — Mauricio Bellora, MonaVie president and CEO

These marketing quotes tell you nothing about mynt, often using undefined terms like “movemynt” to try to explain the undefined term “mynt.”

It’s hard to call mynt noteworthy when it keeps everything the same including the compensation structure. While on the topic of that compensation plan (PDF), there is an income disclosure statement from 2011. I guess it would be too much work for MonaVie to make 2013’s numbers available… and I guess the same about the 2012 numbers. I’d see if they’d hire me, but it seems like they filled their quota of lazy… putting me to shame.

I should mention that mynt does have some new products. In particular they have two new kits of products. One kit costs $1050 and earns 600 PV (personal volume). Another kit costs $550, but only earns 250 PV (personal volume). Earning money is largely dependent on the PV of the people you recruit meaning that they are likely to push recruits to buy the $1050 kit to earn the 600 PV. After all, if you can recruit two people to buy that kit (1200 PV points) it is near the same as recruiting FIVE people who buy the $550 kit (1250 PV points). In fact, they even “bold” that buying the more expensive kit “Keeps you Active for 2 months!” This is a good time to remind that the FTC says MLMs with Required Minimum Purchases to Earn Commissions are Pyramid Schemes. Pushing this purchase as a way to stay in the business clearly is a red flag.

My analysis of the compensation plan above is purposely very simplistic, the compensation plan is so complex it would require more than a dozen blog posts to explain it. This complexity is another red flag of an illegal pyramid scheme.

The mynt products that MonaVie introduced themselves are the basic lotions and potions that are known throughout the industry. They have their protein shake, just like HerbaLife, ViSalus, Shakelee, One 24, Reliv, and a dozen other MLM companies. There’s a “Burn” product based on green tea that can be purchased very cheaply (especially as the healthy drink itself) elsewhere. Then there is the “Cleanse” product… scientifically a load of bovine excrement. There’s a “Build” product of amino acids… which you can get in your whey protein replacing the need for the shake product – killing two birds with one stone. Then there’s a “Pro-bio” probiotic product, which claims to help your digestive system… if you have digestive problems that might be something, but living a healthy life means you don’t need to improve blood sugar control and those with lactose digestion problems have a solution called Lactaid that is proven. Finally there’s the energy drink… similar to the what Vemma’s Verve that’s been pushed to their Young People’s Revolution.

At the end of the day, there’s really nothing to see here… certainly nothing close to spending a $1050 on. I would do a more in-depth analysis of the value of the kits, but MonaVie hasn’t given enough information to go on. For instance the expensive kit contains two bags of shake mix. How many pounds are in a bag? They don’t say, right now.

At the end of the day, mynt appears to be a pile of empty marketing, with even more red flags of it being an illegal pyramid scheme than before, and some horribly priced “me too” products that don’t even contain the juice the company was founded on. If this was a fiction novel, no publisher would take it because it simply is too unrealistic.

MonaVie Mynt has one thing going for them. They are focusing on young adults, who presumably haven’t been burned by MLMs/pyramid schemes previously. Most likely their friends haven’t had the experience of getting burned yet either. More and more it looks like MLM companies have churned through too many people and everyone who is not brainwashed knows it is a scam. It seems like they are admitting that their best plan is to brainwash them young before they know any better.

The MonaVie Mynt program is launching tomorrow. My bet is that Generation C will be connected and intelligent enough to say, “MonaVie, go stuff yourselves! We are smarter than to fall for your artificial hype and marketing gimmicks.” Let’s pray I’m correct.

I hope everyone had a good Fourth of July yesterday. It seems like the Wednesday holiday has put the whole week in slow motion. With that idea in mind, I figure it’s a good time to take short break from the typical personal finance articles and cover that another topic that interests me: multi-level marketing companies scamming people.

Over the last few weeks there have some interesting news about MonaVie. For newer readers, the Lazy Man community exposed the MonaVie scam which lead to the company to threaten me with frivolous lawsuits. Had I known about it at the time I would have hit them with the California Anti-SLAPP Project. I’ve spent some considerable time creating websites like MonaVie Scam in hopes of helping people avoid being scammed out of their hard-earned money.

Here’s some of the news that I found particularly interesting:

Black Diamonds Leave MonaVie – The highest rank you can achieve in MonaVie is a Black Diamond. There are only a few people who reach this level and they make about a million dollars a year (according to the MonaVie Income Disclosure Statement). In short, these are dozen or so lottery winners in the millions who have joined MonaVie only to lose money over the years.

So why would people who were so fortunate to make their millions with MonaVie decide to give it up and leave to go somewhere else? These are the same people who put out countless videos suggesting that people MonaVie saved them from some financial disaster.

It’s MLM’s dirty little secret…. the product doesn’t matter. People have known and written about this for years. Still you see distributors actually pretend that they are interested they are interested in the product. In some cases of congitive dissonance perhaps they actually are… at least until someone offers them more money to pitch another “ground breaking” product.

In this case another company that is growing, ZeekRewards (stay tuned for more on them next week), is offering these people a better deal to bring them over. Since these are independent business owners, you’d think they could sell juice and auction bids (that’s what they are going to do) at the same time like how Wal-Mart sells toothpaste and televisions, right? That would only make sense in the real world, not the MLM distortion field.

These people who left MonaVie will sure push ZeekRewards and claim that it is a great business opportunity – despite the fact that they were gifted the top ranking position. This is what happened with many MonaVie Black Diamonds. They were gifted Black Diamond status after they moved from Amway with their followers. That’s the other dirty secret of MLM, the few people at the top who are making the big money, didn’t typically do anything with that company at all.

MonaVie is going to start enforcing it’s Policies and Procedures – Before this news about the Black Diamonds leaving MonaVie, MonaVie President Randy Schroeder (who left the Agel, another MLM to join MonaVie) warned that MonaVie is going to have to enforce it’s policies and procedures. It’s about time, because over two years ago, I pointed out that Mitch Biggs Scams People and MonaVie Condones It. I couldn’t get MonaVie to enforce it’s Policies and Procedures and get rid of a high-ranking distributor who made illegal health claims about the products multiple times.

In this letter to MonaVie distributors, Randy Schroeder admits that MonaVie has “endured a time of turmoil.” It’s interesting that they are releasing this information now, claiming that it’s passed. I noted in the past that Interest in MonaVie is Fading. Of course you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a Google Trends chart of MonaVie in the United States. It certainly doesn’t look to me like that time has passed for MonaVie. It looks like the decline is steady.

“Two days ago, I received a message that led to a telephone call. It became clear to me that the time to fully enforce MonaVie policies has arrived. A great member of our distributor force told me of her dismay at the following situation: After working diligently for some time to help her husband see the value of the MonaVie opportunity with no avail, this member was able to persuade her husband to join her in St. Louis. Suddenly, he became her partner in yet another way—he fully committed himself to the development of their MonaVie business! Then, last week, this same husband was contacted by a member of their upline, attempting to recruit the couple into a competing business, all the while asserting that such activity was within MonaVie policy and would not be perceived negatively. What occurred? A reversal of the confidence and belief recently gained by the husband in our company and opportunity. The outcome was an effective unwinding of the great St. Louis experience. This is not fair and must not be allowed to occur even one more time.”

In other words, they had this guy scammed into the MonaVie business and another business came along and pitched another offer suggesting that he would be free to do both opportunities. This lead to MonaVie losing a distributor because they hadn’t fully been able to brainwash this person with their St. Louis experience. So rather than compete for distributors fairly and allow them to choose the best opportunity for their personal situation, MonaVie is going to pull out the cult tactics and restrict conversation about other opportunities.

Randy Schroeder closes up with the cult-ish, “you are either with us or against us” mentality:

“My message is very simple: It is time to decide. If you are involved with another company in our industry, decide today… will you commit yourself to success in our business or to another? At MonaVie, we are faithful and will remain faithful to the protection of the business that you build. Permanent income requires permanent commitment!”

How faithful were you to Agel, Mr. Schroeder? Oops we know the answer to that one.

“Unfortunately, as we all have experienced at some point in our lives, some relationships end in a less-than-positive or constructive manner. If you feel that the actions being taken through social media by Mick and Vick Karshner and Rob and Lisa Alwin are having a negative impact on you or the people in your organization, my simple suggestion is to log into your Facebook account and ‘unfriend’ the Karshners and Alwins. This will prevent distributors in your organization from being subjected to any disparaging posts and videos delivered to your Facebook news feed.”

This is something that’s seen often in MLM, but it is rarely talked about. Distributors like to claim that MLM brings together a great community. In fact MonaVie uses the term “community commerce” quite a bit because people know that MLMs are a scam and “community commerce” sounds more positive. However, that only works until you decide to expand your horizons and explore another opportunities. If you do that, then MonaVie is going to tell people to “unfriend” you and the “negative” impact you have in showing them a competing opportunity. This is a whole new chapter to MonaVie and Negativity.

“Avoid any plan where the reward for recruiting new distributors is more than it is for selling products to the public. That’s a time tested tip-off to a pyramid scheme.”

Randy’s letters clearly state that this action to prevent people from leaving is about protecting distributor’s businesses. If these distributors are rewarded more for selling product to the public, this would be a good thing for distributors’ businesses… it would mean less competition from other others selling the same product to the public. However, if they are rewarded more for recruiting (a pyramid scheme) then losing the recruits would be damaging to their business and the pyramid scheme in general.

Some people wonder why I’m so against MLM companies and why I spend my trying to educate people to stay away from them. It’s not just the bad business opportunities. It’s not just the terrible products like $45 fruit juice. It’s that these companies can’t compete without preying on people’s desire for financial freedom, brainwashing them (see the St. Louis experience), and applying cult tactics of information control all to make a dollar at the expense of millions of distributors who often out of work and desperate… the people who can least afford that dollar.

[Editor’s Note: MonaVie has threatened legal action against me twice in an attempt to prevent you from reading this article below. Since I’m within my legal rights to criticize the company they’ve turned to gaming Google to push this article down the search results – an attempt to prevent you from getting the information you need to make an informed decision about the company. This article has been completely updated (as of June 2012) from the ground up to reflect much of the information found from the huge discussion (6000+ comments) that you’ll find following the article. The original article about my introduction to MonaVie is preserved here. Reading 6000 comments may not be practical, so I’ve put some of the most important information at the Juice Scam website. However, due to time constraints, even that doesn’t have the information in these comments.]

Is MonaVie a Scam?

Is MonaVie a Scam?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer? It is perhaps the most incredible example of deceptive marketing in the history of mankind.

What I’ve found is tons of irrefutable evidence supported by reputable third parties that MonaVie is a grossly overpriced product, with little nutritional value, wrapped in a poor business opportunity that appears to be illegal pyramid scheme, supported by nonsensical “scientific” studies and illegal medical claims.

That’s a lot to digest. I’m going to give you a minute to re-read that.

Typically when people are interested in MonaVie, they are focused on two things: 1) The nutritional value of the product and 2) the business opportunity. After all, the promise of MonaVie marketing is health and wealth for you and all your friends.

MonaVie’s Nutritional Value

Many of MonaVie’s claims come on something called a ORAC value. It’s a lab test that measures anti-oxidants in food. On the face of it higher ORAC seems better, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I’m not a doctor, so I’m not going to try to explain ORAC to you. However, Dr. Jonny Bowden explains that MonaVie doesn’t cure cancer and gives great detail about ORAC in the process.

Many distributors make the claim that drinking 4 ounces of MonaVie is like eating 13 fruits and thus is a way to save money. This is a huge lie. MonaVie put out marketing material that said it “Delivers the antioxidant capacity of approximately 13 servings of fruits and vegetables in just four ounces.” MonaVie set up a the classic telephone game where the initial message conveyed changes as it passes through the downline and the words, “antioxidant capacity” get left out. In this statement, the antioxidant capacity is measured ORAC value, and the equivalent fruits and vegetables are not even mentioned. A MonaVie product specialist cleared this up when called, but MonaVie didn’t issue a clarification or change its website for years… see more at Drinking MonaVie is Not Equal to Eating 13 Fruits.

To follow up on the above, a single apple has the antioxidant capacity of 9.5 ounces of MonaVie. If a person was relying on four ounces of MonaVie to give them the equivalent of 13 fruits, they are making a huge nutritional error as 13 apples has the equivalent ORAC value as 123 ounces of MonaVie. MonaVie Original retails for around $1.48 an ounce, so that’s around $182 of juice for the equivalent antioxidant capacity of 13 apples.

A consortium of U.S. government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), USDA, and the FDA to put out guidelines on fruit and veggies and serving size. The result is that 4 ounces of MonaVie is a Serving of fruit which looks like 1 snack container of applesauce (4oz) or about 6 baby carrots. At MonaVie’s retail price of around $6.00 for four ounces that’s like buying a baby carrot for $1.00!

If you need a little more evidence on the nutritional value of MonaVie, Men’s Journal put several fruit juices to the test using criteria set up by a director or clinical nutrition. The result was horrendous, “MonaVie tested extremely low in anthocyanins and phenolics. Even apple juice (which also tested poorly) has more phenolics…” and “Plus, MonaVie’s vitamin C level was five times lower than that of Welch’s Grape Juice. That’s not many nutrients, especially at $1.20 a serving.” Website changes have divided the article into many pieces, but the you can read it in two parts: part 1 and part 2 with the MonaVie-specific comments.

The suit also uncovered an internal MonaVie memo by Ralph Carson, the company’s chief science officer, who created the original juice. The memo was in response to raised eyebrows about claims being made about the juice. Carson cautioned that the drink was “expensive flavored water. Any claims made are purely hypothetical, unsubstantiated and, quite frankly, bogus.”

Those claims that he’s referring to are the illegal health claims that we’ll get to in a bit.

Juice in general is not healthy

Another aspect to consider is that juice itself is shown not to be healthy. For years we thought it was healthy, but that thinking has changed and many view soda and juice as being the same. The HBO documentary Weight of a Nation clearly spells this out.

Here are some key quotes from that video: “Soda and other sugary drinks… is the only individual food that is directly related to obesity”, “There is nothing in a soft drink that is good for you. A Twinkie or a potato chip or a candy bar has at least a little nutrition. These sugared beverages have none at all”, and “Juice is just like soda… there is no difference. When you take fruit and you squeeze it, you throw the fiber in the garbage. That was the good part of the fruit. The juice is nature’s way of getting you to eat your fiber.”

When we take the statements above together, juice the same as soda, soda having less nutrition than a potato chip, it is clear that MonaVie can’t be nutritious. The processing has stripped out the fiber… the good part of the fruit. Some may argue that MonaVie is only four ounces a day and it’s not going to contribute to obesity. Well that 120 calories a day does add up… in a year it is 12.5 pounds (43,800 yearly calories divided by 3,500 calories in a pound).

(To prevent MonaVie distributors claiming that HBO doesn’t know anything about health, Weight of a Nation was done with “the Institute of Medicine (IOM), in association with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).”)

As you can tell from the label above, MonaVie doesn’t have much of the fiber that comes from fruit naturally. Recently MonaVie started to add “fake” fiber (Fibersol-2 / Maltodextrin), so consumers looking at the nutritional label could be easily tricked into thinking that they are getting the good part of the fruit.

Need another source? Here is the New York Times article by three professors of pediatrics who explain “Juice is Not Healthy”.

MonaVie’s Specialized Health Drinks

MonaVie adds a special ingredient or two to its basic juice to create a juice for a specific purpose. The above illustrated the minimal value of the juice alone. Let’s look at a few versions:

MonaVie Active – This MonaVie juice’s star ingredients is glucosamine. In four ounces of MonaVie Active there are 1500mg of glucosamine. On Amazon.com, I found that you can get 375 tablets of Kirkland Glucosamine HCI for a price of $22.55 (as of 6/8/2012). It takes two tablets to equal the 1500mg of glucosamine in MonaVie Active, which comes out to 12 cents a day.

For a year, the Kirkland glucosamine will cost you $43.80. For a year of MonaVie Active (4 ounces * 365 days = 1460 ounces is about 58 and half bottles (25 ounces per bottle). At the retail price of $45 a bottle, 58 bottles costs $2,610 a year. You can save some money by buying MonaVie Active in bulk, but you’ll never get the price under $1000, especially with shipping. You’ll save at least a thousand dollars, perhaps two thousand by going with the equivalent cheap solution from Amazon or your local drug store.

MonaVie Pulse – This MonaVie juice’s star ingredients are plant sterols and resveratrol added. In four ounces of MonaVie Pulse there are 0.8g of plant sterols. I couldn’t find the amount of resveratrol. On Amazon, I found CholestOff, which actually has 0.9g of plant sterols. The 240 tablets, 120 servings, costs $22.22, which is 18.5 cents a day or $67.59 a year.

MonaVie Pulse is typically the same price as MonaVie Active above (around $2610, but cheaper if bought in bulk) and it too will cost you thousands more than the much obvious cheaper solution.

What about the resveratrol? Without knowing how much is in MonaVie Pulse, we can’t really make a fair price comparison. There is this resveratrol, which will cost you $76.19 a year. The combination of CholestOff and this resveratrol is still a bargain at around $140 compared to spending a couple of thousand dollars and not knowing how much resveratrol you’ll get.

MonaVie M(mun) – This MonaVie juice’s star ingredient is Wellmune, a patented derivative of baker’s yeast from the pharmaceutical company, Biothera. Four ounces of MonaVie M(mun) has 250mg of Wellmune in it. Once again, I went to Amazon and found Immune Health Basics, which has 500mg of Wellmune. It costs $37.49 for 60 capsules or about 62.5 cents for 500mg. Since this is double the amount in MonaVie, the true cost per serving would be a little more than 31 cents. It costs $114 for a year’s supply of the same amount of Immune Health Basics as you’d get in MonaVie M(mun).

The pricing of M(mun) follows that of MonaVie Active and MonaVie Pulse above, meaning that you’d save thousands by buying the capsules of Immune Health Basics.

When you do a little more research you’ll find that Wellmune is also similar to beta glucans, a pill that you also might be able to find cheaply. When I last looked into Wellmune, around the time that MonaVie announced M(mun), research as to whether it was helpful was conflicting. One study of people found that they missed no more sick days than the placebo group when taking the product.

MonaVie MX – This MonaVie juice has the star ingredients of Active (glucosamine) and M(mun) Wellmune. Also, in addition to the basic 19 fruit juices in the juice it has 11 vegetables. Below, we’ll cover in more detail why this isn’t necessarily a good thing. As for pricing, this product like all of MonaVie juices is around $40, but in this case a few extra dollars due to having the glucosamine and the Wellmune in it.

MonaVie Essential and MonaVie Kosher – MonaVie essential seems to be a rework of “MonaVie Original” which is the basic juice with no star ingredients. MonaVie Kosher is a basic juice with no star ingredients that has been certified Kosher.

Bottom Line on MonaVie Nutrition: Any way you slice it (pun intended), MonaVie is not a good source of nutrition when compared to time-tested advice of just eating fruits and vegetables. If you are thinking about MonaVie as a dietary supplement, it represents the worst value for you dollar… and it isn’t even close. The examples I gave of a single person spending thousands more than equivalent product is multiplied when you consider a family of four. That family could save an average of over $6000+ a year by replacing MonaVie’s juices with products found in your drug store or on the Internet. Depending on your tax bracket, this simple decision could be the equivalent of getting a $10,000 raise tomorrow or winning a lottery that pays you $10,000 for life.

Does MonaVie Work?

While the talk of many, many testimonials may seem convincing, such testimonials are typical with any MLM product, especially health ones. The fact that you can many testimonials for dozens of other MLM products shows that these testimonials are not unique to MonaVie products… or any ingredients in those products. Instead, there’s a wide variety of psychological phenomena with MLM health products that give people the perception that the products work. For more details see:No Your MLM Health Product Does Not “Work.”

No Barriers to Entry – Since anyone can be a distributor for usually very little money, anyone can be your direct competitor.

MLM Distributors Lack Control of the Business – MonaVie can take your business away whenever it feels like it for whatever reason they want. I think MJ DeMarco might have said it best in his book Millionaire Fast Lane, “I was involved in four MLM companies. Not once do I remember dictating product decisions, research and marketing, marketing restriction, rules, cost analysis or any other activity fundamental to owning a business. As a network marketer, you don’t own a business – you own a job managing and creating a sales organization… MLM distributors are commissioned employees disguised as entrepreneurs.”

Below we’ll get to the point about MonaVie and pyramid schemes. We’ll cover how “creating a sales organization in MLM” can be considered as participating in illegal pyramid scheme.

MLM and the Reality of Saturation – Recruiting people into MonaVie is where the Diamonds make their money. The problem is that the market is already saturated. You simply can’t go to the top of the pyramid anymore because those positions have been taken for years. In order to get there you have to build thousands of people under you and if those people wanted to be juice salesmen they would have been long before now.

Understanding the Churn Rate in MLM – Somewhere between 60% and 90% of distributors in MLMs leave the business every year because of the first bullet point above. They didn’t make any money. MLMs replace these people with new hopefuls because their sales pitch is enticing. When MonaVie recruits someone they tell them that they too can have health and wealth for them and all their friends. Who wouldn’t want that? The scheme churns through people every year with enough people quitting and joining so that the pyramid scheme never explodes past the population of the earth.

MLM distributors like say that it is up to the person to do the work and not be “Lazy.” Well I’m an expert on Lazy and I can tell you that isn’t the truth. In MLM, losing is not a matter of effort, it’s a mathematical certainty. The circumstances surrounding the system set people up to fail.

MonaVie’s Illegal Health Claims

When I first wrote about MonaVie and wondered why people would spend $45 on juice, I had no idea how the product was marketed. I was shocked as distributors left comments connecting MonaVie to helping with cancer, autism, fibromyalgia, and just about any and every other medical condition under the sun. MonaVie has not been approved by the FDA to help with such conditions making these claims illegal.

It wasn’t until later that I learned that MonaVie CEO was the Vice President of Dynamic Essentials a company that madeRoyal Tondan Limu juice. The FDA warned the company about website claims to treat various diseases such as cancer, arthritis, and Attention Deficit Disorder caused their products to be in violation of the law. The company continued to sell the product and the FDA and Department of Justice fined the company millions and went as far as destroying the product. The action essentially put an end to Dynamic Essentials.

Dallin Larsen held “fireside chats” with hundreds of people. There is one “fireside” chat on Archive.org. He tells this convincing story how Dynamic Essentials is part of a publicly traded company with products in Wal-Mart and that they found this fascinating ingredient called Limu Moui. He goes on to essentially claim that limu that unique benefits to help with the system. At the 7:25 minute mark of the audio, Larsen tells of how he just came back from a tour talking to people who have used the product and tells of the stories he heard and how it has helping with asthma, arthritis, chronic fatique, fibromyalgia, lupis, migrane headaches, etc. He then goes to say that “We can’t make [the claim that you aren’t going to get cancer and heart disease]… I know that this product is having a benefitial impact on people’s health.

MonaVie, is an identical copy-cat of Royal Tongan Limu juice, but with acai instead of limu. The illegal health claims that I’ve seen in the comments on my article and elsewhere on the Internet come straight from the leadership.

Newsweek did a story on MonaVie in which Dallin Larsen acknowledged that while MonaVie has an 18-person compliance team which investigates distributors making false claims, “It’s next to impossible, like herding cats.” In short, MonaVie opened Pandora’s Box with their distribution system. The proper solution to fix this systemic problem is to distribute the product like Ocean Spray or Welch which doesn’t have these problems. MonaVie refuses this logical solution that would prevent consumers from be defrauded out of their hard-earned money and still allow them to get the product to those who were interested in it.

When I found MonaVie distributor Mitch Biggs claiming that MonaVie prevents swine flu, I decided to help out MonaVie’s compliance team and let them know. Mitch Biggs should know better. He was a MonaVie Emerald Executive, one of the top 166 distributors at the time, who make an average $155,000 a year. My goal was to find out how MonaVie would enforce the its policies and procedures which allow it to end a distributorship who is caught making illegal claims. Would MonaVie do what’s right and make an example to show distributors that they can’t be making these claims? Or would MonaVie cave, not wanting to create a rift amongst its distributors? The answer: Mitch Biggs Scams People and MonaVie Condones It.

A recent commenter suggested that MonaVie’s compliance was doing its job, so I showed him this story, which is about two years ago as of this pointing (June 2012). I decided to go an look and see if MonaVie is still letting Mitch Biggs be a distributor, which lead me to this video on a local news show. It seems like Mitch and Ashley Biggs are making erroneous and deceptive claims multiple times saying that MonaVie is an “easy, convenient and tasteful, way to get your fruit every day” and “just an easy, easy, way to get your fruit.” As we saw in a section above, MonaVie’s Nutritional Value, this is quite untrue. The spot even took the effort to bring a vase of 13 fruits to illustrate the deception.

It may seem like I’m picking on one distributor, but this is a leading distributor who was made an example of once before and yet continues to break the law publicly. If this is the stuff that is going on in the open, imagine what is going on behind closed doors!

Some may suggest that this is an isolated case – one example of a bad seed that every industry has. That’s simply untrue. It is a systematic problem which is so prevalent that Dr. Johnny Bowden’s article that I mentioned at the very beginning of this article was titled, “No More Claiming MonaVie Cures Cancer!” These are the kinds of things that happens when you tell distributors that they can be millionaires if you recruit enough people to buy a juice that happens to be priced at 20 times more than other juices. The distributors have to come up with some way to market the obscenely overpriced product. They are naturally going to try to make a point that it is a value for consumers as a replacement for medicine or something seemingly expensive like buying a vase of 13 fruits.

MonaVie’s Deceptive Marketing

If I were to go into depth about MonaVie’s deceptive marketing, I would never finish writing this article. This article is already so long that I wonder if you’ll read it. There’s just too much to say. I also think I covered a lot of it above. So here I’ll just give a few more examples:

In the above section, MonaVie’s Nutritional Value, I went into detailed the 13-servings of fruit and ORAC score myth. That’s a typical example of the marketing to keep in mind. Here are a few others:

19 fruits in the juice – MonaVie adds all these juices because the public has a perception that more juices is better. That’s not necessarily true. Regular readers know that a mutual fund with more stocks does not necessarily out-perform those with fewer stocks. A pizza with a 7-cheese blend is not necessarily better than one with a 3-cheese blend. In fact, the more ingredients, the easier it is to dilute the ingredients that MonaVie touts like acai. When you have 18 other fruits in addition to acai, the amount of acai could be less than 6% and still be the first ingredient on the list. However, if MonaVie only had 2 fruits and acai was listed first, you’d know that you are getting at least 50% acai in every ounce.

Freeze-dried acai – For years MonaVie touted the amount of freeze-dried acai because it had a huge ORAC score. The reason it got such a high score is the fact that water was taken out, which allowed them to pack more powder per ounce. However, it was shown that MonaVie is less than 2% freeze-dried acai, meaning that even with a high score, there wasn’t enough of it to make a significant difference.

MonaVie’s “Studies”

MonaVie relies heavily on their Scientific Advisory Board, specifically Dr. Alexander Schauss. Schauss has a long list of reputation problems. One of them was that he faked his credentials and got a mail-order PhD degree from California Coast University. MonaVie pitched Schauss as an expert on acai, but they are the only ones who recognized him for anything like this. The reality is that Schauss was the supplier of his OptiAcai brand to MonaVie.

Schauss, through his AIBMR Life Sciences, pumped out a lot of “research” which could fool some people into thinking that there was actual science. In fact, MonaVie product specialist Erica Bryant wrote distributors to tell them that AIBMR is the only source of that they should use. Some of this research led to ridiculous papers such as this “Double-Blinded, Placebo-Controlled Study” on MonaVie by Schauss. It doesn’t take a scientist to see that it was made for the specific purpose of giving distributors fuel to recruit more people. Tellingly, the final conclusion of the study made mention of another study that showed that eating fruit had positive results as well.

“Not all multilevel marketing plans are legitimate. Some are pyramid schemes. It’s best not to get involved in plans where the money you make is based primarily on the number of distributors you recruit and your sales to them, rather than on your sales to people outside the plan who intend to use the products.”

“The Commission’s recent cases, however, demonstrate that the sale of goods and service; alone does not necessarily render a multi-level system legitimate. Modern pyramid schemes generally do not blatantly base commissions on the outright payment of fees, but instead try to disguise these payments to appear as if they are based on the sale of goods or services. The most common means employed to achieve this goal is to require a certain level of monthly purchases to qualify for commissions. While the sale of goods and services nominally generates all commissions in a system primarily funded by such purchases, in fact, those commissions are funded by purchases made to obtain the right to participate in the scheme. Each individual who profits, therefore, does so primarily from the payments of others who are themselves making payments in order to obtain their own profit. As discussed above, such a plan is little more than a transfer scheme, dooming the vast majority of participants to financial failure.”

This appears to be how MonaVie works. Distributors in the upline earn commissions based on the purchase of other distibutors below. The distributors below are required to be “active”, which means either:
(A) buying product themselves or
(B) selling twice the requirement to a preferred customer

When a distributor satisfies the requirement by (A) buying product for themselves and MonaVie pays a commission to the upline on that purchase that it can be considered a pyramid scheme using the FTC’s guidelines. This is the typical way that requirement is satisfied. The distributor application for MonaVie prominently includes the Auto-Ship Program (ASP) so that new distributors can satisfy the active by buying product requirement right away.

The option (B) to qualify as active by recruiting enough preferred customers, is a new option. Previously the only method was the above option A) which makes it quite clear that MonaVie could only be viewed as a pyramid scheme. With the new option (B) it becomes a little more complex. Since (A) is a sign of a pyramid scheme, we need data from MonaVie on the percentage of distributors that qualify through the (B) option. (MonaVie doesn’t disclose this information.) Anecdotal evidence tells me that the (B) option is quite rare. As explained in the above section, MonaVie’s Nutritional Value, MonaVie’s juices represent a poor product at an extremely expensive price (approximately 20 times the price, ounce for ounce, of other 100% fruit juices). In the rare case that a preferred customer is buying the product, it is mostly like that they were sold on the illegal medical claims or deceptive marketing, as described in the section above.

For more sources about MLMs and pyramid schemes from the FTC and others, I’ve put together a compilation here: MLMs Vs. Pyramid Schemes

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How you can help put an end to the scam

The best way to put an end to this scam is to go to the FTC Complaint Assistant and file a complaint. A recent article on CNBC had comments from the FTC saying that few people file complaints on these schemes and thus they rarely put in the resources to investigate them. There are two reasons why there are so few complaints:

People are brainwashed from the beginning that the system “works”, and “the only variable is you.” Thus people feel as if it is their own failure rather than recognizing the system was mathematically set up to fail over 99% of people from the beginning.

The FTC doesn’t do anything. You leave a complaint and that’s the end of it. The complainant gets no follow-up from the FTC and there’s never any evidence that the complaint is ever read. It’s fundamentally terrible system… but that’s what we have to work with.

With that said, if you’re as upset as I am about people being lied to and defrauded out of their money, please leave a complaint. If you do, please sent me a quick mail. This way, I’ll have an idea of the minimum number of complaints that MonaVie is getting.

MonaVie Mynt

Update: MonaVie has started marketing to college students and those who have recently graduated. These are probably the worst candidates for such overpriced MLM products. They have little income and often high student loans. I believe that MLMs have nowhere else to turn as the general population know that it’s a scam. I think they believe they will catch them early before they’ve gathered the wisdom to know to stay away.

[Editor’s Note: This article itself is a constant work in progress. I didn’t have the space to get into explaining the scamming behind MonaVie’s MORE charity. Publication deadlines force me to publish this without proofreading. In the future, I hope to go into more of MonaVie’s products like its RVL line of weight loss, which is a copy of other other MLMs and also a terrible value compared to the equivalents in stores. However, at this point, it does more to help people to get this information in their hands quickly and that means saving some of the editing for another day.]

When I first started Lazy Man and Money, I said that I’d probably write about technology 5% of the time or so. This is one of those times. Don’t be scared. It really is a more of a David vs. Goliath story – one of the few that hasn’t hit the movies yet. (I’m getting word into Morgan Spurlock soon.) If you are willing to bare with me, I’ll make it interesting. I’ll wrap the technology references in real world analogies – like a crushed pill in apple sauce, you won’t even notice.

The Guatemalans Attack!

If you’ve seen my website over the last few days you’ve seen a message of: “Did you find this website slow to load or unresponsive? I have been a victim of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) attack and I have strong evidence that MonaVie is responsible which I will provide in a few days.”

I’ve had a few people ask ask why my website is slow or why they can’t get to it at all. A DDoS attack is when bunches of computers (perhaps hundreds or thousands) overload your website at once. A website is a lot like a tunnel, it can only handle only so many people at once. Big websites like Google have a really big tunnel that can handle just about anyone (billions will get you that). Smaller websites have to decide what is a reasonable size tunnel for the amount of people who typically want to get through. A denial of service attack effectively clogs that tunnel with hundreds or thousands more traffic, which creates traffic jams and crashes. This is what you’ve seen. Typically such attacks come from one other computer, which is easy to block – you just take away the access from that computer to your road.

However, in this case the attacks are coming from tens or hundreds of thousands of computers from all over the world. This makes it difficult – nearly impossible – to take away the access from any one computer launching the attack. Typically someone will write a computer virus that allows them take control of these computers for this purpose. The users of these computers probably don’t even realize it. In this case, I can see that all the computers are coming from Guatemala, Nicaragua, and dozens of similar smaller countries.

What is interesting is that launching these illegal attacks have become surprisingly affordable and common. I found this article on about digital hitmen for hire. The article explains that for about $1200 a month you can hire a Russian group who will launch these attacks for you.

I tried to explain this situation to my wife while fighting the attack. I tend to dumb down the technology aspects as I know that’s not where her interests lie. My over-simplistic explanation, in the heat of defending the attack, came out as something like, “It looks like MonaVie has hired the Russians to send an army of Guatemalans to attack my website.” As soon as I said it, I figured that 99% of society would be fitting me for a straitjacket. My wife in a great moment of levity joked:

“Matate, El Hombre de Cansado, Matate!”

My wife’s Spanish is better than mine, but we are about 15 years removed from our last Spanish class. Nonetheless, I got the joke. She followed it up noting that Jack Bauer is available and this seems right up his alley.

In this world of politically correctness, allow me to fully disclose that I don’t know that any Russians were involved. The “Guatemalans” serve as a convenient shorthand for the tens of thousands of computers in dozens of countries involved in the attack. As for MonaVie, well let’s get to that…

MonaVie Behind the attacks?

On Feb 3, 2012, I found my JuiceScam website attacked. JuiceScam is a consumer advocacy site warning people about the transgressions of MonaVie, a multi-level marketing company that sells $45 bottles of juice. The scam is so complex, with more layers than an onion, that it truly does require a full website to explain. MonaVie, naturally, hasn’t taken too kindly to this. They’ve threatened me with legal action twice complaining about my rankings in Google. Specifically they’ve said:

“When an individual types in MonaVie at www.google.com, in the search box, and clicks on Google Search, the first page of Google that appears is:

MonaVie realized that they had no legal grounds to stop me from publishing the truth about their company. If you are MonaVie, what do you do next? You send a letter to your distributors telling them about your online reputation management including the following:

“One of the many factors that Google uses to determine which websites should rank in the top positions is the popularity of a website. To determine popularity of a website, they look to see how many people link to it. Google treats a link from one site to another as a vote. The more votes you get, the better.

If you have a website, a blog, participate in forums or other people’s blogs, link to official MonaVie websites and social profiles when you have the opportunity.

For example, if you are writing a post in a forum talking about how you love MonaVie Pulse, make sure to link the words “MonaVie Pulse” to the Pulse microsite (www.monaviepulse.com).”

and

“If you link to any negative websites, take down the link. You may have inadvertently linked to a negative site on your website or blog when discussing their website. Just as links will help us promote positive MonaVie sites, they will also help negative sites rank better.

If you see a negative website in the search engine results, don’t click on it. If lots of people are clicking on a negative website on the search engine results page, Google may rank it higher because it sees that so many people are clicking on it.”

That was over 6 months ago and things hadn’t changed. Google still ranked my site very highly.

So let’s recap:

MonaVie threatened to sue me to get me out of Google’s rankings.

MonaVie enlisted their distributors to try to hide the truth.

My site exposing MonaVie’s transgressions was attacked by a DoS attack. Google has openly said that they stop showing websites up when they are not reliable. They believe that such websites shouldn’t be showcased to visitors because it is a poor experience for Google users (which is true).

This attack has given MonaVie has gotten exactly what they have repeatedly stated they were looking for. Someone searching Google for my article would find that it doesn’t exist at all today. The 6000 comments that people spent years writing will not available to most

When I stated that “I have strong evidence that MonaVie is responsible” this is what I was referring to. MonaVie had motive, opportunity, and had shown intent on several previous occasions.

Is that strong evidence? I’ll let the reader be the judge.

Note 1: I’m working with a group to get my site protected against such attacks. It has taken a little time and I thank you for your patience during this time. I hope to have it finished up this weekend, if the organization can give me a few hours of their time. Otherwise look for improvements early next week.

Note 2: Though I use the term “hack your website” in the title, many, including myself, consider a DDoS not entirely a hack. It is not like they break into your website and steal any information. I went with the term because it is better understood by the average person for when someone attempts an illegal technological attack, which is accurate here.

Note 3: I could go into much more detail about the attacks, but in interest of protecting myself from the attackers, I don’t want to give details of what I do and do not specifically know.

I hope everyone has been enjoying the holidays? I’ve been going at a little slower pace here at Lazy Man and Money as I try to live up to my name by spending more time with friends and family. However, it’s time to get back to work and I figured I’d start with this.

Speaking of scammers, here is some info about the Massachusetts Homesteaders Exemption.

You must own, and reside on that property and you are required to be a permanent resident of Massachusetts to claim the exemption.

Hmmm, may be a problem [what he thinks my name is]. Have you not been a permanent resident of [where he thinks I live] for quite some time, all the while claiming the exemption in Mass as a permanent resident? tsk tsk.

You should publish some of these on your blog, readers may be quite interested. Maybe in the business section would be more suitable. Do you have a ‘How To Scam The Govt.’ section on [Lazy Man and Money]?

While the commenter wasn’t accurate with what they thought my information was, the person did know enough and was specific enough to make me think, “This just doesn’t seem to be a bluff. At least if it is a bluff, this person it is a pretty good one.”

A Little Background about Me and MonaVie

The article I wrote garnered a lot of comments and a lot of information about the scam came to light. There was so much information that I had to create another website, MonaVie Scam to better organize the information and help people find it. With more than 100 articles, I still have only scratched a tiny fraction of what’s in the comments here. That fraction is enough to provide irrefutable evidence supported by reputable third parties that MonaVie is a grossly overpriced product, with little nutritional value, wrapped in a poor business opportunity that may be an illegal pyramid scheme, which is itself wrapped in illegal medical claims, supported by nonsensical “scientific” studies, and tied to a fraudulent charity.

MonaVie, understandably, doesn’t like this. In fact MonaVie has threatened legal action against me twice and they’ve turned to gaming Google to try to push my article down the search results. A reputable company would address the criticisms and take that as an opportunity to provide better value to its distributors and customers. A disreputable company that is built on scamming others, tries to hide what they doing. MonaVie’s actions show their true intentions.

That’s enough background, let me give MonaVie an example on how one is open and publicly addresses criticisms – in this case, this cyber-stalker’s claim.

Evaluating the Cyberstalker’s Claim

On first glance, it seems like this person has obtained access to my private tax filings, right? That’s the clear implication with the use of “claiming the exemption” and “How To Scam The Govt.” quote. The unusual thing is that if this person actually had my tax filings, they would have realized that they had the wrong information about me. The other thing they would have noticed is that I haven’t prepared my own taxes in years. I’m very sure that my enrolled agent wouldn’t allow me to take a tax exemption in MA, when I file my taxes with CA as my primary residence. Not only would my tax person not allow it, it would be the easiest thing in the world to find in an audit.

When I talked to my enrolled agent, they explained that you can’t claim a homesteaders exemption – there’s no place on the tax form for such a thing. I didn’t understand why until I contacted my real estate lawyer. He pointed out that the Massachusetts Homesteaders Exemption has nothing to do with taxes. here’s a lawyer’s explanation of Massachusetts Homesteaders Exemption:

“The estate of homestead, or ‘homestead exemption’, provides protection and security to homeowners, eliminating the threat that the equity in their principal residence could be exposed to satisfy common debts or obligations.”

As you can tell, the “homestead exemption” isn’t related to taxes, it is about providing a safe haven from debt collectors in the form of a primary residence. So for one to “claim a homesteader exemption”, I would have to be in debt and I would have to invoke this form of protection – two things that aren’t close to happening. As I have taken rental income from the property in question, it is clear that I wouldn’t be able to “claim a homesteader exemption.”

So where did this cyber-stalker come up with this? When you buy a home, you fill out a number of documents. If you have a good lawyer, you also fill out a Declaration of Homestead so that you can have this protection in case you need it. The document is a matter of public record. I could look up my mom’s or anyone else’s. It seems to me that the cyber-stalker looked up that I had filed this document when I bought my home. Confusing matters more, in some states, such as Florida it seems, there appears to be a homesteader tax exemption. With this you can see that you have to actively prove residency when taking that tax claim.

An exemption from having your primary residence taken away from you in a bankruptcy event (for example) and a tax exemption are two totally unrelated things.

To make the cyber-stalker look even more ridiculous, there’s the fact that I probably can claim this equity protection in the future. My lawyer pointed to the great Massachusetts Homesteader FAQ on SalemDeeds.com (a Registry of Deeds in MA). Under “Can my Homestead be terminated?” is this:

“Yes, the estate of homestead may be terminated by any of the following methods:

abandonment of the home as a principal residence by the owner, owner’s spouse, former spouse or minor children, only as they apply to rights of the persons who abandoned the home. Military service shall not be considered abandonment;”

So while I have abandoned the home as a principal residence, our move was for my wife’s military service. I’m exempt from abandonment, which means I can claim exemption as if I had lived there the entire time.

Grading this Cyber-stalker

Since this cyber-stalker thought he was going to teach me a lesson, I thought I’d flip it back on him. I’ll play the teacher and grade the attempt:

Sleuthing Skills: B – Give credit to where credit is due. He got enough information about me right. In my defense, I don’t aim to be that anonymous, I just wanted to be able to share my income and net worth and other financial topics without it getting back to my manager at a job. It wasn’t until MonaVie distributor Glenn Siesser threatened to kill me, that I thought it might be a good idea to remain anonymous for safety reasons. Still, I know how people can cyber-stalk me. It takes a little technical knowledge. I would have given him an A, but again, with some of the information inaccurate, I had to dock him a letter.

Threat Appearance: A – I love the whole, “I caught you cheating on your taxes” angle because it A) looks like he had access to my taxes which is concerning and B) has what he feels is evidence is do me some kind of financial harm and/or jail time.

Threat Substance: F- – It’s hard for me to give a grade low enough on this one. It was wrong on every level possible.

Final Grade: D – All the sleuthing skills and threats in the world don’t add up to much without the substance to back it up. There’s a reason why people aren’t worried about empty threats.

Final Thoughts

It’s interesting to me that someone would even have the thought process to try to attack me. It’s not that I think of myself as untouchable, but that I’m just the messenger. If I were caught for tax evasion and/or murdering a dozen people, it still wouldn’t change what MonaVie is. The attack itself only serves to make MonaVie look more desperate. It also puts an even brighter spotlight on the negative aspects of MLM and highlights why people should not get involved with them. I just don’t see Ocean Spray employees cyber-stalking its critics.

This event serves not only backfires by tainting MonaVie’s public image, but it also renews my focus to make the truth about such practices known. In all honesty, I haven’t really cared much about MonaVie for some time. I considered that dead horse well-beaten long ago. MonaVie’s been going downhill over the last couple of years. I’m much more concerned about Nerium and that scam, which is much more confusing for the average consumer and seems to have snarled many more people. However when this comes along, it brings my attention back to MonaVie.

Connect

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